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We've been covering quite a few mini PCs lately, and there's one that always comes up in the comments: Apple's Mac Mini. Apple started selling tiny desktops with this name in 2005, and it's been the cheapest way to buy a Mac ever since. It's also nearly the only Mac that Apple didn't update in 2013.

Apple hasn't updated the design of the Mini since 2010, when it introduced the aluminum unibody design the computer still uses today. It measures 7.7 inches squared and is 1.4 inches high, which is still pretty small by desktop standards but positively huge compared to computers like the Intel NUC (4.4 by 4.6 by 1.4 inches) or Gigabyte Brix Pro (4.5 by 4.4 by 2.4 inches). The presence of faster, more tightly integrated chips makes it easier to cram even more performance into even less space than was possible just a few years ago. The next Mac Mini we see may well be even smaller than before.

But just because things can get smaller doesn't always mean that they should. We have no idea when or even if Apple is planning to refresh the Mac Mini, or what that refresh will look like when it comes. But we can look at wider trends in the PC industry, at advances in CPUs and other system components, and at what Apple is doing with its other Macs to make a case for (and against) a mini-er Mac Mini.

Shrinking the Mini

Enlarge/ Imagine one of these in unibody aluminum with an Apple logo on top, and you come pretty close to what a next-generation Mac Mini could look like.

Andrew Cunningham

Those first aluminum unibody Minis had to make room for a few components that either have gone or are going out of vogue. It ditched its slot-loading optical drive in the mid-2011 model, and 2.5-inch spinning hard drives are slowly receding not just from Apple's Macs, but from all high-end PCs everywhere. Leaving out components like this is part of why NUC-like systems can get so tiny—there's no optical drive, and the smallest models omit any kind of 2.5-inch drive bay in favor of thin SSDs on small cards, like the ones you'd find in a laptop.

Apple could save a substantial amount of space by switching to these smaller drives, and it already has in almost all of its other Macs. The MacBook Air, Retina MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro have all switched to PCI Express-based SSD cards, and they're available in the 2013 iMac either as a standalone option or alongside a larger hard drive in a Fusion Drive configuration. In fact, even if the Mac Mini stays the same size, we wouldn't be surprised if it picked up a PCIe slot to accommodate these kinds of SSD cards, since the current Mac Mini's 2.5-inch SSDs only come in slower SATA III variants.

Other hardware has progressed quite a bit too. Some versions of Intel's Haswell chips integrate the system chipset on to the same package as the CPU, saving space on the motherboard and allowing for less complicated cooling fans. If the Mini skips a generation of Intel CPUs, the next-generation Broadwell chips are sure to continue to expand on this trend. Currently, the only chips with integrated chipsets are dual-core chips intended for Ultrabooks and high-end tablets, and Apple's current Mac Minis use standard dual- and quad-core laptop chips with separate chipsets. As we see in the NUC, though, the Ultrabook parts have improved enough in performance that they could conceivably deliver decent desktop performance. Even fully fledged quad-core desktop chips like the Core i7-4770R can fit in a Mac Mini-esque chassis—you wouldn't necessarily have to sacrifice performance to make the computer smaller.

The last reason why Apple might go for a smaller Mac Mini? The company likes to make its desktops smaller and more streamlined, even if it comes at the cost of features some of its customers like. We saw it first with the 21.5-inch 2012 iMac, which used a slower hard drive and removed its user-accessible RAM slots in the name of thinness. It happened again with the 2013 Mac Pro, which is still an incredibly powerful workstation but has given up most of its internal expandability to fit in its new case. A new, smaller Mac Mini would probably still be a decent computer, but Apple is all about the PC-as-an-appliance. The current Mac Mini has user-accessible RAM and two drive bays, but that's no guarantee that the next one will.

Maintaining the status quo

Enlarge/ The Mac Mini's internal power supply is one reason why it's as big as it is.

There's certainly room for the Mini to get smaller, but Apple has a few compelling reasons to keep the Mini just the size it is.

First and foremost is the current model's integrated power supply. Pre-2010 Mac Minis came with a power brick that was maybe a third of the size of the system it powered, and both the NUC and the Brix Pro are as small as they are because they include their own sizable power bricks. To make the computer part of a Mac Mini smaller than the current one is wouldn't be difficult; to make one with an integrated power supply significantly smaller is more difficult. It's not a gigantic component, but it takes up space and generates heat that would both need to be accounted for.

There's a chance Apple could ignore this and release a mini-er Mini that goes back to an external power supply. This isn't usually how Apple works, though—moving the power supply into the Mac Mini's chassis was presumably done for a reason, and when Apple makes design decisions like this, it doesn't usually reverse them. All three of the company's desktops completely eschew external power bricks and have for years. That's not likely to change.

Enlarge/ These mini-desktops have smaller footprints than the Mac Mini, but the external power bricks add to their overall volume.

Andrew Cunningham

The next consideration has to do with the way the Mac Mini is positioned. Apple killed its Xserve rack-mounted server back in 2011, and the special "Mac Pro Server" configuration died with the old gigantic chassis. In lieu of those offerings, Apple will sell you a Mac Mini Server for $999 that includes a quad-core CPU instead of a dual-core one and a second hard drive installed in the computer's second drive bay. Setting these drives up in a mirrored RAID configuration provides some basic data redundancy that should really be considered a bare minimum for a server product.

Apple's server software can really run on any Mac, so strictly speaking there's no need for a dedicated server product. But the Mac Mini Server (a consumer computer modified to be better-suited to server-y tasks) really seems to be made to run OS X Server (a consumer operating system modified to be better-suited to server-y tasks). Apple has given up on the enterprise server market, but offering a computer that's meant to be a server fills an important niche in its lineup, both for iOS and OS X-centric small businesses and Windows-centric IT shops that need to be able to manage a few iPhones or Macs. A smaller Mac Mini that couldn't offer the same features wouldn't be as good of a fit, and the way Apple manages its supply chain means it will probably want to stick to using one chassis for every possible Mini. Building a separate enclosure just for the Mac Mini Server isn't likely to happen.

Our final argument in favor of the Mini staying the way it is: the computer just doesn't get all that much attention from Apple. The company doesn't usually break out sales of specific models, but we already know that iPhones and iPads outsell Macs by a huge margin, and we can safely assume that Mac laptops outsell Mac desktops since we know that to be the case in the wider PC industry. It took five years for the Mini to get its first significant redesign, whereas most Macs are redesigned every three to four years. The Mini just isn't a big enough revenue generator to merit a ton of Apple's attention, and we think the company would take an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to the current design when adding Haswell or Broadwell CPUs.

Like so much speculation about Apple's future plans, take all of this with a grain of salt—we don't know anything about a new Mac Mini that you don't know, so the best we can do is use Apple's past behavior to predict its future behavior. If you want (or don't want) a smaller Mac Mini, duke it out in the comments below and we'll run a follow-up with your thoughts in a few days.

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Andrew Cunningham
Andrew wrote and edited tech news and reviews at Ars Technica from 2012 to 2017, where he still occasionally freelances; he is currently a lead editor at Wirecutter. He also records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites

147 Reader Comments

Why does it even need to be a desktop? We've already seen with 8" Bay Trail Tablets that you can get some pretty good performance. Apple could easily go down the Surface Pro route and people would eat that shit up.

One reason would be if you want to run 2 or 3 monitors. A Surface Pro would probably do OK with one external monitor if you're not doing a lot of video, but here at the office, we're not even ready to switch to integrated graphics on desktop PCs - everyone runs with at least two monitors and at least one dedicated graphics cards. Even laptops are a compromise compared to conventional desktops in some uses.

If there is a market for smaller devices, Apple would be foolish not to pursue it.

They said this about the netbook during that craze too.

Predicting what Apple will do is a maddeningly imprecise science.

And they made the macbook air. What's your point?

Thanks for the chortle. The MacBook Air (and it's specs and it's price) are highly dissimilar from the average netbook.

Not really. The MBA is just as underpowered as a netbook in relative terms. Both are smaller machines that make performance and feature tradeoffs in order to allow for smaller size and weight.

The MBA is essentially the Apple take on the netbook.

I'm with you on this. It's amazing to me how easily people forget the past when it comes to things like this. Both the Mac Mini and the MBA were horrendously underpowered products when they first launched. The original mini didn't even ship with enough RAM to comfortably run the OS that it was designed to run and were largely considered toy desktops unless you pulled the RAM and doubled it with new DIMMs. Same story for the MBA. Fantastically underpowered, the chassis was some first rate design and engineering and certainly dropped your jaw the first time you saw one, but that first in the industry ultra slim profile allowed people to overlook the glaringly weak performance of the hardware. Reminds me a lot of the netbook story. Small underpowered hardware which was gimmicky and niche for a few years until technology caught up and underpowered became adequately powered. Apple's version were certainly prettier than anybody else's, but they usually are.

I'd be worried about heat, even with an external power supply. I had a Dell rep tell me unequivocally that in their experience with otherwise comparable desktops, the smaller the case, the shorter the life of the PC. They blame it on heat and ventilation issues in the smaller cases, which makes perfect sense to me even on small form factors with external power supplies. Processors generate a lot of heat, and it seems logical that all that heat would affect the life of the other components. For now, I'm sticking with conventional desktop towers everywhere space is not an issue.

The dell rep was probably talking about hard drive failures due to heat. They really don't like anything above room temperature for long periods of time.

If the next Mac Mini has a PCIe SSD card (highly likely) then it shouldn't be a problem.

Once you get down to a certain size, there aren't many benefits in going smaller. The smaller desktop won't offer any different uses from the slightly larger desktop. That said, Apple does like to shrink things, so the mac mini will probably get smaller at some point. I just wouldn't expect such a change to become a primary driver of sales.

I think the only motivation Tim Cook would need is to reduce the size of the packaging, which would reduce carbon emissions during freight.

Apple mentions this issue almost every time they make a product smaller. Whether it's an iPod or Mac Pro, and the Mac Mini is their most environmentally friendly mac (it's all over the product description).

When they can make it smaller without sacrificing anything, they will do it.

I think they are probably more concerned with saving money on freight, rather than the planet. The 'green cred' is just a nice side effect.

I could see Apple nuking 2.5inch HDDs as an option, which would save considerable space (aside from the PSU, that's basically where all the NUC volume savings come from) and telling anyone who wants a 'server' that they can buy an external disk enclosure and suck it up.

The complicating factor, though, is probably whether Apple cares about OSX in cost-sensitive environments. At various points, they've had awkward holdover products(a specially configured emac at one point, later a gimped iMac with no discrete GPU and possibly some other bits trimmed) mostly to keep OSX alive against impecunious school IT departments.

If they still care about that, forcing SSDs and expensive drive enclosures on their cheapest, most lab-friendly OSX product will be an issue. SSDs have gotten a lot cheaper; but boring 80/160GB HDDs are cheaper still.

If they've decided that iDevices are just fine for handling their designs on the educational market, then keeping a computer around because it's a cheap way to fill computer labs will probably not be a priority.

If there is a market for smaller devices, Apple would be foolish not to pursue it.

They said this about the netbook during that craze too.

Predicting what Apple will do is a maddeningly imprecise science.

And they made the macbook air. What's your point?

Thanks for the chortle. The MacBook Air (and it's specs and it's price) are highly dissimilar from the average netbook.

Not really. The MBA is just as underpowered as a netbook in relative terms. Both are smaller machines that make performance and feature tradeoffs in order to allow for smaller size and weight.

The MBA is essentially the Apple take on the netbook.

As the owner of an eeepc 1000h, I can 100% guarantee you that the macbook air - even at the time that the eeepc 1000h was newish, was definitely not nearly as underpowered. The 1000h I had, one of the "better" specced netbooks at the time, was still ridiculously slow, coming in at slightly, just ever so slightly higher benchmarking scores than the original ipad. 1.6ghz single core atom processor, compared to macbook airs 1.6ghz core 2 duos. intel GMA 950 integrated graphics as opposed to macbook airs nvidia 9400, 1GB ram, compared to 2, the list just goes on and on, the netbook was actually 0.2 pounds heavier than the macbook air of the time, and twice as thick!

Apple didn't believe the netbook boom was anything more than a fad, and they stuck with their guns and they were right.

Why does it even need to be a desktop? We've already seen with 8" Bay Trail Tablets that you can get some pretty good performance. Apple could easily go down the Surface Pro route and people would eat that shit up.

One reason would be if you want to run 2 or 3 monitors. A Surface Pro would probably do OK with one external monitor if you're not doing a lot of video, but here at the office, we're not even ready to switch to integrated graphics on desktop PCs - everyone runs with at least two monitors and at least one dedicated graphics cards. Even laptops are a compromise compared to conventional desktops in some uses.

I think the Mac Mini could stand to be a bit smaller now, but it doesn't need to be as small as an NUC or Brix. One idea I liked was simply making it rounder, but still roughly the same size. This should still leave enough space for a 2.5" drive, and they could maybe even capitalise on the shape to fit a large round fan like the new Mac Pro, but still in the blower style.

I'd definitely expect them to ditch the second 2.5" drive bay anyway, maybe in favour of a PCIe Flash blade for fusion drives or fully SSD storage options, though with it probably being tucked away somewhere.

One reason for not making it too much smaller is that with the current size the circular base fits four screw holes in a 100mm x 100mm square, perfect for mounting on monitor with VESA mounts, though of course it'd be nice if Apple actually supplied the holes rather than leaving you to do it yourself.

I do think though that there's a point at which it becomes too small, and I think the current Mac Mini is a fairly good size, maybe a little big. So they either need to go a bit smaller, or reorganise the internals. Going NUC small would be a mistake though; the Mac Minis used to have external power bricks, and personally I would consider returning to that to be a step back.

I'd pay iMac money for a current style Mac mini but with a desktop-class GPU.

So would a handful of other people.

Apple is not interested in niche markets though. Which means a mac targeted exclusively at geeks is just never going to happen.

If Thunderbolt 2.0 gets added in the next revision, I would willingly consider an external GPU. Especially if it came in an attractive and quiet package that matched the mini's look.

Unless somebody loosens up on Thunderbolt licensing, you might as well just buy an iMac at that point. OWC's cheapest option, at present, is over $350 for 1 x8 PCIe slot, with the multi-slot cages aimed at Mac Pro users with specialty expansion cards starting at a thousand or so. Then the video card.

A die worth of Intel silicon is never going to be free, obviously; but they appear to have pretty much stamped out anything that isn't north of $300 and shiny looking. Compare to the dodgy-but-functional end of the expresscard-to-PCIe market, which has no restrictions on market entry.

Assuming Apple does in fact want to keep selling the Server-edition mini, then it'll also need to be at least large enough for one gigabit Ethernet port. I can't believe even Apple would be so bold as to tell people to use a Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet adapter on their server.

I absolutely love my Mac mini. I sold my 2006 Mac Pro clearing off acres on my desk and replaced it with this little fireball last year.

It's the heart of my plex server which is constantly encoding and transcoding video, also have a newznab server running as well as sabnzb sick beard and I can still play around Photoshop and Xcode. I never thought I would give up on the Mac Pro line but now it's simply overkill when the Mac mini offers so much.

Seconded. My Mac Mini is a mid-2009 model with two drives but it is still an excellent homeserver. I recently checked the power consumption of it and was very impressed. 7.5-8.5W idle and 1.3W while sleeping.

In comparison, my new Airport Extreme Base Station uses 9W idle. I thought that is quite remarkable.

If there is a market for smaller devices, Apple would be foolish not to pursue it.Also, when it comes to the economics of materials, think about it: they will be using less metal/materials to build those machines while maintaining decent sales/profits. It is a win-win situation for Apple to keep reducing the size of those machines.

That's... not really how Apple operates.

If there's a premium market for smaller devices on which they can maintain their profit margin, they'll pursue it.

In answer to your question, Andrew, if it were a more attractive proposition to some hackintosh builders it would probably appeal to me. For that it would need to offer more accessibility to the internals. So going smaller probably wouldn't help.

The machine would still be ready built and run out of the box. Apple would still use the CPU as the main price differentiator.

Those that are happy to take off the lid, side or whatever, would still be able to swap out the Drive/s & RAM* themselves easily, without having to consult a many stage guide on iFixit.

It might seem like the Betty Crocker of computer building, where adding your own egg to a premixed recipe is akin to installing the Hard Drive & RAM of your choice, but some people appreciate that choice as seen in devices like the NUC.

I doubt we will see such a device from Apple. It would have been fun though.

*I know the RAM is easy to do on the Mac mini, there's no guarantee that would remain the case on a future version.

I'd be worried about heat, even with an external power supply. I had a Dell rep tell me unequivocally that in their experience with otherwise comparable desktops, the smaller the case, the shorter the life of the PC. They blame it on heat and ventilation issues in the smaller cases, which makes perfect sense to me even on small form factors with external power supplies. Processors generate a lot of heat, and it seems logical that all that heat would affect the life of the other components. For now, I'm sticking with conventional desktop towers everywhere space is not an issue.

Haha, a Dell "rep" is now the unequivocal voice of why Apple can't/won't shrink the mini.

Apple needs to actually expand the Mac Mini to allow a short, half height PCI-e expansion card. With Haswell incredibly small PCB foot print, it could be done today if Apple increased the height of the system a bit.

I wouldn't mind an even smaller Mac but it should get a proper name: Mac Micro or Mac Nano. As for what a hypothetical one would look like, I'd guess it'd look similar to the new Time Capsule tower design. A lower power Core i7 with two SO-DIMM slots, PCI-e based SSD and 802.11ac cards could all easily fit to the Time Capsule's chassis (but without the internal hard drive).

Smaller form factor means difficultly dealing with thermal loads, which basically eliminates any reasonable GPU. As this is the main thing that makes the mini useless to me, and many others, I'm not sure size *should* be the major concern for anyone.

This week I replaced my 2008 8 core Mac Pro with a 2.6GHz Core i7 Mac Mini. I ran GeekBench and xBench on both this morning, and the Mac Mini outscored the Mac Pro on every single number. The only place the Mac Pro was better was the disk subsystem, but that's because I have an SSD in the Mac Pro and I haven't set up Fusion Drive yet on the Mini. I'll put a 750GB Samsung 840 Evo into the Mini when the bracket arrives, and that will make a sweet Fusion Drive setup.

I had 4x1.5TB drives in the Mac Pro as well in a RAID0 array which was nice and fast. Currently those are in a USB3 enclosure and performance is pretty terrible. I'll have to do something about that; probably a Drobo 5D. I was RAM-constrained in the Mac Pro with 20GB, so 16GB on the Mini is even worse. Right now I'm apparently using 24.79GB of Virtual Memory. The Mac Mini is quiet at idle, but it's obnoxiously loud under load. The Mac Pro was always noisy, but it never got obnoxious thanks to its large, slow fans vs. the Mac Mini's small fast fan. Kind of like the difference between a German Shepherd's bark vs. a poodle's.

I tried to hold out for a replacement Mac Mini, but it was the right time to retire the Mac Pro so I did. I couldn't really care less how big or small the computer is, and I DEFINITELY don't want to sacrifice power for size. Here's what I'd like to see in the new Mac Mini (or expect), in decreasing order of importance:

1. 32GB max memory, at the very least.2. Better graphics performance. I'm driving a 30" and 24" monitor off this thing. It does it, but I'd like it to do it better.3. PCI-e flash, hopefully with spinny disk option for Fusion Drive.4. Faster CPUs5. Quieter operation. Maybe a move to a Mac Pro-style case would help with this.

I didn't buy a new Mac Pro because I don't think I need it. That, and it's not available yet anyway. I'm a professional, but I'm not a graphics professional. I can buy a new Mac Mini every year or two without feeling too bad about it, but if I buy a Mac Pro I'm stuck with it for a long time. I've LOVED my 2008 Mac Pro, but it's going on the auction block as soon as it's cleaned off.

If there is a market for smaller devices, Apple would be foolish not to pursue it..

It's called an IPhone

I kid, kind of. I cannot help but wonder if the reason that the Mac Mini receives so little love is because powerful smart phones could potentially replace this class of desktop computing in the near future. All that's really missing is a video out on those devices.

Below a certain point, smaller size and lesser weight cease to be advantages.

The NUC-type device should be small enough to attach to the rear a a monitor or TV.

I see no advantage in getting smaller than 5x5x1 inches.

One other point. I do wonder about the thermal performance of the NUC devices. Are the production versions going to overheat and throttleback under sustained loads after they get a bit dusty, after say 12 months use?

Benchmarks are run on new machines, and many news organizations run the benchmarks on specially tuned example systems obtained directly from vendors. These benchmarks are limited in their ability to predict real world performance.

Except it actually shipped with a Core2Duo and not a down-clocked single core Celeron or Atom CPU.And it had a decent screen. And a nice touchpad.And it was a lot thinner. And cost much more than a netbook.

Completely different product and target market/use-case. More accurately, it was Apple's take on an Ultrabook. Before that word existed.

Why does it even need to be a desktop? We've already seen with 8" Bay Trail Tablets that you can get some pretty good performance. Apple could easily go down the Surface Pro route and people would eat that shit up.

One reason would be if you want to run 2 or 3 monitors. A Surface Pro would probably do OK with one external monitor if you're not doing a lot of video, but here at the office, we're not even ready to switch to integrated graphics on desktop PCs - everyone runs with at least two monitors and at least one dedicated graphics cards. Even laptops are a compromise compared to conventional desktops in some uses.

That's not a bad idea if you're trying to make a tablet like Surface Pro double as a desktop. Thanks for pointing it out. (It doesn't change my mind about small form factor desktops, but it's definitely a great option for someone who wants a tablet but occasionally needs a desktop).

Except it actually shipped with a Core2Duo and not a down-clocked single core Celeron or Atom CPU.And it had a decent screen. And a nice touchpad.And it was a lot thinner. And cost much more than a netbook.

Completely different product and target market/use-case. More accurately, it was Apple's take on an Ultrabook. Before that word existed.

I'd pay iMac money for a current style Mac mini but with a desktop-class GPU.

So would a handful of other people.

Apple is not interested in niche markets though. Which means a mac targeted exclusively at geeks is just never going to happen.

I would say that, on the desktop, Apple is only interested in making niche products. The thing is the niche they are going after are not geeks who think about hardware. If you want expandability you are just not in the Apple demographic.

If there is a market for smaller devices, Apple would be foolish not to pursue it.

They said this about the netbook during that craze too.

Predicting what Apple will do is a maddeningly imprecise science.

And they made the macbook air. What's your point?

Thanks for the chortle. The MacBook Air (and it's specs and it's price) are highly dissimilar from the average netbook.

Not really. The MBA is just as underpowered as a netbook in relative terms. Both are smaller machines that make performance and feature tradeoffs in order to allow for smaller size and weight.

The MBA is essentially the Apple take on the netbook.

As the owner of an eeepc 1000h, I can 100% guarantee you that the macbook air - even at the time that the eeepc 1000h was newish, was definitely not nearly as underpowered. The 1000h I had, one of the "better" specced netbooks at the time, was still ridiculously slow, coming in at slightly, just ever so slightly higher benchmarking scores than the original ipad. 1.6ghz single core atom processor, compared to macbook airs 1.6ghz core 2 duos. intel GMA 950 integrated graphics as opposed to macbook airs nvidia 9400, 1GB ram, compared to 2, the list just goes on and on, the netbook was actually 0.2 pounds heavier than the macbook air of the time, and twice as thick!

Apple didn't believe the netbook boom was anything more than a fad, and they stuck with their guns and they were right.

Yes. There is a huge misconception that the Air was Apple's netbook. But as you said, Apple stuck with real processors while it was the netbooks that used Atom CPUs and cut corners in other ways that Apple did not. Basically, the PC netbook makers completely misinterpreted what the Air was doing, turning the netbook into a classic market-annihilating Race To The Bottom.

Today, I can order a 13" MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, a core i7, a 512GB SSD, a 12-hour battery and a Thunderbolt port. That doesn't sound like a netbook at all.

What's great about the "MacBook Air is a netbook" lie is that it dovetails with the "Apple charges triple the price" lie.

Netbooks were cheap slow plastic crap with really small screens -- 9-inch 1024x600 was typical. (And then because those tiny screens and keyboards and trackpads sucked so much, they eventually got bigger before dying out.) The Air started at 13-inch 1280x800, then later split into the 11-inch 1366x768 and 13-inch 1440x900; and was not cheap, nor plastic, nor as pathetically slow as the Atoms in netbooks.

Except it actually shipped with a Core2Duo and not a down-clocked single core Celeron or Atom CPU.And it had a decent screen. And a nice touchpad.And it was a lot thinner. And cost much more than a netbook.

Completely different product and target market/use-case. More accurately, it was Apple's take on an Ultrabook. Before that word existed.

Apple specced it with a nice C2D; but the first-gen Air would start kick in thermal throttling if you so much as looked at it funny. They didn't ship a gimped part; but their target size, weight, and fan noise were such that the Air was a bit of a mess until they got some cooler silicon in there on the subsequent revisions. Once Apple's traditional rev. A issues were worked out, that's all been forgiven and/or forgotten, and the present day is a fine product; but the original launch Air was so thermally constrained that it might as well have shipped with a CPU several bins lower, for all the real-world performance it was good for.

Apple needs to actually expand the Mac Mini to allow a short, half height PCI-e expansion card. With Haswell incredibly small PCB foot print, it could be done today if Apple increased the height of the system a bit.

Lots of techie Mac users have asked for the mythical "xMac," a headless iMac with slots.

Instead Apple turned around and made a small headless Mac...with no slots: the new Mac Pro.

The trend does not look good for expansion slots appearing in any Mac in the future.

I see it happening: a special launch event.Tim Cook comes on stage shows 1 new tiny box and says"Today we will show not 1 but 3 amazing products""A mac mini, an apple tv and a game console""A mac mini, an apple tv and a game console""A mac mini, an apple tv and a game console"...

Apple needs to actually expand the Mac Mini to allow a short, half height PCI-e expansion card. With Haswell incredibly small PCB foot print, it could be done today if Apple increased the height of the system a bit.

Lots of techie Mac users have asked for the mythical "xMac," a headless iMac with slots.

Instead Apple turned around and made a small headless Mac...with no slots: the new Mac Pro.

The trend does not look good for expansion slots appearing in any Mac in the future.

Agreed. That is why i went out of my way to get the older Mac Pro with PCI-e expansion instead of the new Ivy Bridge-E unit. I have no regrets as I've already upgraded my GPU with a GTX 770. So I've gotten more for less money purchasing the older model.